The craggy scowl of Walter White, the “Breaking Bad” protagonist played with Emmy-winning intensity by Bryan Cranston, stares down from buildings and bus stops all over town, as AMC gears up for the final eight episodes of the show beginning Aug. 11th. After six years, the mood among the revelers milling atop the fake grass at Sony Television’s premier party for the show on Wednesday was half-celebration, half-wake.

It was, as AMC President and General Manager put it at the show’s Television Critics Association Panel on Friday, “a bittersweet occasion.”

The gloom is understandable. “Breaking Bad” is one of a handful of AMC shows, along with “Mad Men” and “The Walking Dead,” that have proven that good television – at least, as critics and awards judges see it – is also good business.

AMC Networks, which includes AMC, the Sundance Channel, IFC and WE tv, has enjoyed unusually strong ratings growth in an environment where many of the biggest channels lost viewers in the most recent season. AMC Networks’ second quarter ratings were up 16% in the second quarter, according to Bernstein Research, making it the biggest gainer among the media companies it covers, and underpinning Bernstein senior analyst Todd Juenger’s expectations that it will be able to report affiliate fee increases in the mid-teen percentages when it reports quarterly earnings next month. AMC Networks’ stock price is up 37% so far this year.

These kinds of numbers help explain why everybody from Discovery Channel to the Hallmark Channel was touting their entrance into original scripted series at this year’s TCA. (The former’s “Klondike” is coming in 2014, while the latter’s “Debbie Maccomber’s Cedar Cove” debuted last Saturday night to win its timeslot in total viewers.)

And they help explain why AMC, a network that, as Mr. Colllier noted, had no original scripted series when he came on board in 2006, on Friday announced that, for the first time, it was picking up two of them in the same cycle. Both “Turn,” about a group of Revolutionary War-era spies, and, “Halt & Catch Fire,” about the personal computer revolution of the early 1980s, will debut in 2013. The latter, it’s worth noting, is from the executive producers of “Breaking Bad.”

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